New exhibit explores how Fort Monroe contraband decision shaped the Civil War

HAMPTON — Long after the Civil War ended, the Fort Monroe general who made one of the conflict’s most momentous decisions insisted that he understood its significance from the beginning.

But on the late May 1861 day that Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler granted asylum to three Hampton slaves as “contraband of war,” the lawyer turned volunteer soldier failed to note his command among dozens of others recorded in his order book.

Not until a few weeks later — after the original trio had grown into a sprawling tent colony housing more than a thousand refugees — was there any clue of how important and far-reaching Butler’s military-minded edict might become in shaping the war and giving birth to the new Union goal of black emancipation.

By the end of 1864, tens of thousands of slaves from all across Virginia and Eastern North Carolina had left their masters for the hope they saw in the contraband camps of Hampton and the Federal stronghold they began to call “Freedom’s Fortress.”

“With the 150th anniversary of the Civil War — and all the attention that Fort Monroe is getting as a newly named national monument — the time to take a closer look at the contraband decision and its impact has come,” says curator J. Michael Cobb, describing the Hampton History Museum’s newest exhibit.

“This was a major step in the road to emancipation — and it’s the one that gets Lincoln and his cabinet’s attention above all others. But it hasn’t been explored in a serious way before.”

Made up of scores of period images and artifacts, “Toward Freedom: Hampton and the Contraband” explores several key aspects of the freedmen’s communities that cropped up in Hampton first — then had a pioneering impact on the way the Union army and the federal government in Washington, D.C. moved from the novel notion of contrabands who were not quite free to embracing the idea of emancipation.

You can read more about the exhibit and the contraband decision's impact on the Civil War in the Daily Press Good Life section on Sunday, Oct. 20.

But while you're waiting check out the link above for a video tour of the exhibit conducted by curator J. Michael Cobb.